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Two months since the fire. Two months since he’d nearly lost everything to the rage of a girl and her ramshackle family. Two months since Vander had nearly killed him again. Two months, and he was still cleaning up messes, putting out fires, and seizing control of every single asset he could lay his hands on.
Well, Silco was no stranger to long nights and difficult work.
Vander ran a tight ship, he had to give him that much. Oh, there were holdouts, for sure. There were still those people who believed in Vander’s spineless policy of conformance and uneasy, simpering peace.
Those people who would be happy with whatever scraps the topsiders deigned to let fall into the sump to be fought over by the fissurefolk they were otherwise happy to ignore.
Without Vander to guide them, though, they were fracturing. Already, he could smell the blood in the water. No peace lasted long in the Lanes. Only Vander’s firm hand and personal charisma had kept the people from going at each others’ throats on a day-to-day basis, and without him, anarchy was soon to follow.
That was what Silco was trying to prevent. A little chaos was good. Fear kept the senses sharp and the people desperate.
It kept everything under control.
If only there weren’t so much damn paperwork.
It had long since passed being a ‘reasonable’ hour, and his eyes ached from reading all of the reports that had crossed his desk. Worse than that, for every report he read, another seemed to manifest in its place.
Most of them were simple, thankfully. Protection accounts and rackets coming due. Favors owed and collected. Some were pledges of loyalty, others were death threats—those would be dealt with when he had more manpower available, but they weren’t a priority.
Someone who truly intended to kill him wouldn’t announce it in writing, they would simply see the matter done. Those threats were the barking of toothless, frightened dogs, and nothing more.
But they would still be dealt with. Examples had to be made, after all.
Silco blew out a breath, then reached for his cigar before remembering he’d smoked through it an hour ago, and sighed.
“It’s always something,” he muttered as he leaned back in his chair and pulled his cigar-case from his pocket.
It was silver—real silver—and he’d taken it off a man he’d killed personally. Silco remembered that much. He didn’t remember why he’d had to kill the man, only that it had been frustrating and obnoxious, and he’d taken the case a sort of payment.
‘I’ll have this for my trouble, thank you.’ He remembered saying that to the man as he died choking on his own blood.
Silco frowned as he flicked the case open and pulled a new cigar free, then closed it and put the case back in his vest pocket. It was probably just the long night getting to him, but it irked him that he couldn’t remember the man’s face or name. Or even his crime.
Clipping the end from the cigar, he put it to his lips and raised his lighter, but paused as a faint creak of wood met his ears.
Motion from somewhere in the room with him. An assassin? It wouldn’t be a surprise but it would certainly be inconvenient. Maybe one of those death threats hadn’t been fangless barking after all. He kept going with the motion of lighting his cigar though. No need to let on that he’d heard them.
Tuning his ears to the ambient sounds about him, Silco felt his blood quicken at the thought of violence. He was tired and irritated, and yes, he was starting to get old. He may have been younger than Vander—the old hound had been long in the tooth by the time he finally went down—but he was no pup by any means.
But he was still clever.
Silco took a long draw on the cigar as he returned the page below him. Some blackmail account or other. He wasn’t really reading it. He was waiting for movement. Another sound. Something to give his assailant away.
Blowing out a stream of smoke, he waited patiently. A proper assassin wouldn’t rush the job, so Silco wouldn’t either. The moment the killer moved he would—
Creak
Silco looked up. The sound had come from right in front of him.
There was nothing there. The whole front of his office was empty. Although the door was slightly ajar.
Invisible? Surely not. A mage-assassin? That thought turned even Silco’s dark heart cold. The only ones who employed such tools were very certain elements of Noxus…at least so far as he was aware. They had no reason to interfere, did they?
Plucking the cigar from between his lips, Silco lowered it to the ashtray, set it down, and decided on a gambit.
“You may as well come out, I’ve known you were there for a while now,” he said, schooling his voice to a tone of calm, collected control.
A tiny gasp was drawn sharply from in front of him.
No…not in front. Below him. Below the line of the desk.
Frowning, Silco stood, leaned forward, and looked down to find a messy head of blue hair, and its owner curled up against his desk clutching the most ragged stuffed bunny in creation so tight that its head was liable to pop right off.
“Powder?” She flinched but didn’t answer, and Silco sighed as he stood, his jangling nerves calming as they registered the false alarm.
Moving around to the other side of his desk, Silco knelt and held out a hand to Powder who stared at it cautiously for a long moment before reaching out and taking it. It was a simple ritual, one to establish a connection. It hadn’t taken Silco long to recognize someone starved for affection, and a simple touch could calm her and open her ears to his words.
“You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said calmly.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Powder mumbled. “Bad dreams.”
Silco clicked his tongue but didn’t argue the point, instead, he just nodded. After all, how many sleepless nights had he whiled away in his office? Her dreams were no more pleasant than his own, it would seem.
“Alright then.” Silco moved forward and scooped Powder up, and she clung to him like he was her only port in the storm as he walked her over to his chair and sat down.
“Would you like to stay up with me?” He asked, and Powder nodded wordlessly. “Very well, but I’ve work to do.”
“What kind of work?” She asked.
“The boring kind,” he said ruefully, and gave her a faint smile.
And she laughed.
It was a surprisingly light sound. It might have been the first laugh he’d heard out of her since that night. Children really were resilient creatures, capable of enduring and rising from the depths of despair and into new strength. Gods knew he and Vander had done the same before the first rebellion.
That sound, though. It was a good sound. One that he heard too little in the Lanes. If Vander had his way, it would forever have remained the dingy, defeated place it had always been, all for the sake of peace.
Peace. Ha. A slow death, Silco called it.
“What’s blackmail?” Powder asked as she looked over the sheet.
“Blackmail,” Silco said quietly as he signed off on it and moved it to the ‘finished’ pile, “means that I know something or have something that the person in question does not want me to know or to have, and will pay me great sums of money to ensure I do not use it against them.”
Powder looked up at him with concern. There was fear too, just a little bit, but it was there.
“Why?” She asked.
Silco sat down his pen and leaned back in his chair again, letting Powder relax against him as he set his hand on her head.
“Because everyone in this world learns differently, Powder,” he began. “Some learn quickly, and some learn slowly…but there is a secret to learning, you see,” he smiled and raised an eyebrow at her. “Would you like to know the secret?”
She nodded excitedly.
“The secret,” Silco continued, “is that humans are really just animals, and what do animals do when something hurts them? Say if a sump-rat strays too close to a hot chemical pipe and burns itself?”
“It…runs away?” Powder guessed.
“And?” Silco prompted.
“It doesn’t touch the pipe again?”
Silco tousled her hair and nodded, and Powder beamed. “That’s right,” he said. “The rat learned because it got hurt, and because it learned it made sure that it wouldn’t get hurt again, and wouldn’t get killed, you see? So blackmail hurts them to teach them a lesson, and they learn that lesson, and then they learn not to get hurt or killed.”
Those big blue eyes of hers were wide and rapt with attention. She was holding on to every word, and Silco wondered at how frighteningly much he could accomplish if everyone in his organization listened to him with such fervor.
“This way, eventually, everyone learns,” Silco said. “So that’s the secret…some learn slowly and some learn quickly, as their nature dictates, but if you hit someone hard enough…” he reached down, took her little hand, and curled it into a fist for her as he looked her in the eye. “Hit them hard enough? And they all learn quickly.”
Slowly, Powder nodded, then turned to look at the stack of unread papers on the side of Silco’s desk, then turned back to Silco and asked, “how many people do you have to hit?”
“As many as it takes,” Silco replied as he swept up another paper and scanned it. “Because if I’m careful, and I hit them just hard enough then I won’t have to hit them again, and nobody else has to die.”
She went silent for several long moments after that as she slumped against Silco’s lean form while he went through more papers. It wasn’t comfortable, and yet, with Powder there, it was almost easier to concentrate.
Perhaps because she was a reminder of what he was fighting for. A new nation. A free nation. Zaun. A place where there could be enough for children like Powder.
“What happens if you don’t hit them hard enough?” Powder asked suddenly, her voice small and quiet.
Silco sighed and set down his latest paper.
“If I don’t hit them hard enough,” he replied, “then they’ll think that I’m too weak to hurt them any more than that, and then…then they will fight, and lose, and die, and maybe they will kill others as well, and it all would have been prevented if I’d just hit them a little bit harder.”
“But why would they fight at all?” Powder asked, sitting back up and when she looked up at him there were tears in her eyes.
Silco straightened, and as he did, Powder shivered. Without thinking, he reached behind him and pulled his coat off of the back of his chair, and slung it over her shoulders. She was swimming in it, but it was warm, and she smiled that painfully fragile smile back at him.
“They will fight because people are really just animals. They will fight because, in the end, that is what they want to do.” Silco straightened the large, long coat over Powder’s narrow shoulders.
Powder looked thoughtful as she relaxed against Silco again, and let him go back to his work. He got through almost a full hour that turned out to be surprisingly productive before she spoke up again, and when she did, it was to pose a question that he hadn’t asked himself for a very long time.
“Is that why you fight? Because you want to?”
Silco nodded. “Yes, because I was made to fight,” he replied, “but as I said, we all want to fight, so that’s not really important.”
“What do you mean?” She asked.
“What I mean, is that the why is simple, but the important part isn’t the why, it’s the what.” Silco looked down and offered another faint smile as he brushed some hair from her tired eyes. “That is to say…what we are fighting for.”
Her eyes were wide and enraptured again as she asked. “What are you fighting for?”
“Freedom,” he replied quietly. “For you and me, and for everyone in the lanes. I will bring this undercity into an age of prosperity if I have to drag its inhabitants kicking and screaming into it.” He smiled as he straightened the lapels of his jacket. It really did look absurdly large on her. “So what do you think, hm? Would you like to help me?”
She froze up then. That fear was in her eyes again, but it wasn’t fear of him. It was fear of everything else.
Fear of herself.
Powder swallowed audibly again and again as her tiny frame was wracked with dry sobs. Silco waited. She would talk. She always did if he gave her time. In fact, if he gave her time, getting her to stop talking was the bigger trick.
“I can’t,” she finally said.
“Why do you say that?” Silco asked calmly. He framed his tone carefully, he needed her to answer as much for his own curiosity as for hers.
“B-Because—” tears finally began to flow as she looked away from him— “I’m a j-jinx! If I t-try to h-help you, I’ll g-get it wrong and just b-blow it up!”
“You think so?” He asked, keeping his voice level. “Why?”
“BECAUSE I ALWAYS DO!” She screamed.
Silco didn’t react to her volume, he just nodded and ran his fingers over her head again, brushing loose strands away only for them to fall back over her face, and then he would repeat the process, and slowly she began to calm down.
“Do you know what a jinx is?” Silco asked.
“It’s me,” she replied bitterly. “It means a curse!”
Silco nodded. “That’s right, but you know jinxes can go either way, that’s how they work…so if someone crosses a jinx, then the bad luck becomes theirs.”
Powder frowned and shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“It means, maybe you are a jinx, but that doesn’t mean you have to jinx me,” Silco said, his smile growing faintly predatory. “You’re clever and brilliant, and, if you put your mind to it, you could be a jinx to everyone and everything that threatens our nation of Zaun.”
The look on her face changed several times over the course of a moment. There was confusion, then concern, then curiosity, then a look almost like wonderment as she raised her head and smiled. Her eyes were still red, and her nose a little snotty, but she was smiling.
“You…You don’t care that I’m a Jinx?” Powder asked, and Silco shook his head.
“No, my dear, no,” he said softly as he brushed tears from her eyes. “You’re my jinx, after all. How’s that? Your name doesn’t have to be Powder anymore, it can be Jinx. That way, everyone will know that crossing you means bad luck.”
“Jinx…” she repeated the word once, then twice, then three times, before nodding. “My name…My name is Jinx” she bared her teeth in a wide grin that almost matched Silco’s. “And it means I’m a jinx!”
“That it does,” Silco agreed.
The excitement was infectious, and Silco found himself smiling despite his exhaustion. Slowly, though, the smile faded from Powder’s—no, her name was Jinx—from Jinx’s face as she sniffled, then rubbed at her eyes as the tears started up again.
“Why are you crying, Jinx?”
“B-because…th-they always called me a j-jinx, b-but…” she flinched and Silco could practically feel an episode building up in her. He headed it off by brushing the tears from her cheeks.
“It’s alright,” Silco said quietly as he pulled her close. “Don’t cry…they called you Jinx and they were right, and Jinx is perfect.”
Jinx froze, swallowed thickly, then nodded against his vest.
“If you ever feel like crying just remember that, alright?” Silco said softly. “Remember that you don’t have to cry, because Jinx is perfect.”
She still cried, but only a little, and Silco let her. She was still a child after all, and she would be stronger for it. Tears were water, and from water rose strength, and Powder? Powder drowned in her tears already. Jinx would come out the stronger for it.
Jinx would be perfect.